I did a little research and was going to post it in a thread but got sidetracked into talking about the Roman Empire. The thread author then said he only wanted to discuss the constitution. I can't find a suitable thread for this discussion so I propose a new one. This is it.

Ian Goldin has a little book (I need to read his bigger works sometime which are far better ) which I will quote.

Divided Nations: Why global governance is failing, and what we can do about it (Oxford)

In 2010 there were over 220 million international migrants, more than double the figure recorded in 1980.

59

The era of accelerated globalization since 1990 has ironically been associated with the proliferation of nation states and increasingly stringent border controls.

More migration but lots of barriers to bottleneck the situation. The benefits to consider are many.

quote:36

The key benefit of migration to the receiving country is that, by allowing people to move, it improves the welfare of the society as a whole. In Exceptional People : How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future my co authors and I show that migration brings many benefits to the migrants and also to the host country

....As the US continues to demonstrate, the flux and mix of cultures leads to innovation. It is now calculated that migrants provide more than half of the innovation in the US, even though they are only around 12 percent of the population, with Silicon Valley perhaps providing among the most compelling evidence for the beneficial effects of high skilled migration.

I had some good mainstream media articles on the astonishing benefits of innovation from the immigrants but failed to post them. The issue of "sending countries" suffering a supposed brain drain is a false alarm and it is just not the accurate way of seeing what goes on. The real thing is "brain circulation" happening for the benefit of all including the sending nations. The dynamic is very mutually beneficial.

Look at the benefits of open borders.

quote: 36

The World Bank estimates that increasing migration by 3 percent of the workforce in developed countries between 2005 and 2025 would result in global gains of U. S. $356 billion, and completely opening borders over the next twenty-five years would yield the world economy an extra US $39 trillion and radically reduce poverty.

This is not an easy policy to implement but understand that the 40 trillion dollars in benefits to the economy would be at least 20% higher growth than would otherwise be the case. The world economy is under 100 trillion dollars now and not growing too much lately. The world wide growth benefits of these "open borders " are only based on free human travel and do NOT include the huge additional benefits of 100% free trade and tearing down the gargantuan and endless trade barriers. Both Europeans and Americans pay over $1000 more per person each year on food due to disastrous protectionism. The world wide benefits there are potentially limitless if we somehow managed to get the political will to do the right thing and put humanity above narrow and greedy special interests . Putting humanity first for a change and slaying nationalism and xenophobia would help us all - even the nationalist minded folk who are mislead into cutting their own throats (thinking in their own 1 dimensional way to be doing something good for themselves ).

Without major changes, the most rosy scenario doesn't have the world economy above $200 trillion by 2035. Opening borders (now!) alone would add over 20% (and probably much more to the economy. The growth (the added trillions above where we are now at the end of 25 years) would actually be much more than 20%.